


Reindeer women

by Taabe



Category: Finnish Mythology
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:44:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taabe/pseuds/Taabe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lemminkäinnen stole Kyllikki from her home in Pohjola — in the north, among the Saami, the reindeer herders. How does she save herself — and who helps her?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reindeer women

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gileonnen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/gifts).



Kyllikki pushed through the hide entrance with the wooden bowl still in her hands. She held it clenched, and the rim hurt her through her gloves. The bowl stank. The man with the gashed leg had been sweating and sick with the pain. 

Her unconcious grip kept the mess from spilling, and no servant came to take it from her. Out here, they would be glad enough to leave her a foul job to do.

She came out from the dim light and stood blind in the late night on the trampled snow between the rigged shelters. Snow fell stinging.

When the first men from the outlying farms had come with the warning, the household had run from the hearth with a scatter and a squawk of provisions. _Raiders,_ said the man bleeding through a dirty bandage. And the armed men of the house were few and ill-taught. The far-minded man — she did not think of him as her husband — had fled from his fueding in the north and left his family open and unprotected. 

So she had helped children onto the sledges between baskets of barley and dried apples. She could still feel the thin ribs under broadcloth of the girl, six years old, who had called for her father as Kyllikki lifted her.

She had flared from one task to the next, keeping ahead of her mother-in-law’s voice, and then they were moving, the house servants skiing beside the sleighs, and the children clutched furs about them and tried to quiet the infants. 

They kept on into the woods and the night, and she had tried to talk to Ainikki’s youngest children, to calm them, because Ainikki was riding with her mother. And so it was not until now, until Lempi called a halt and she had stumbled with the rest to rig temporary roofs for the wounded and find furs enough to warm the sleeping children, that Kyllikki had understood who had led the attack.

As she had leaned over the farmer with the gashed leg, cleaning blood and pus from the contusion, he had looked away from her. And then he had looked back at the dark braid escaping its coil to fall over her shoulder, and his eyes were hard, and he had said a word under his breath. It might have been _raider._

It might have been _traitor._

 

She did not know his name.

The snow creeled under her feet. By the glimmer on the crust of ice, she felt her way toward the roughly dug privy trenches in the drifts behind a spur of spruce. Under her boots the snow had the high, creamy keening of the dry cold that froze sea water. 

The raiders were her own people. They had come as she had prayed they would. All these months, she had made every passage of the shuttle through the loom a prayer, every beat of the fulling of cloth, every thrust of the broom. She could not sing — she could not pray aloud in her own language. Ainikki would have told her mother, and Lempi would have sweated it out of Kyllikki. But she had prayed as she breathed. And they had come, and she had run from them.

She dumped the bowl’s mess into the trench and scoured it with a fistful of snow. The snow went into the trench and she scooped another. Scraping with snow, she looked back through the trees to the sleighs. People would be watching them and the beasts. She could see the sleighs only as shadow between the trees, against the snow-heavy branches beyond. The wind lifted a sheet of loose snow, and the new snow fell into the sweeping marks of her snow shoes.

She put her back to the sleighs and walked into the trees.

 

The snow fell stinging. She pushed through the spruce and the pine with the blood singing in her ears and resolutely thought of her feet, of the slide-and-up step to move smoothely over the snow. She thought of finding the smooth patches that would carry her, without rocks or ice or hidden gullies. She thought of the cloudlight on the snow even in the woods with snow falling. 

She kept walking forward and would not think of the people behind her, or of shouting, or of the overtaking sigh of skis.

She walked into the wind and held the wooden bowl as a shield against it, and the snow fell. She began to touch the trees as she slid past, mitten tip to branch tip, to will them to stand between her and the camp. 

When she had walked the first soreness into her legs, she stopped in a small opening of unbroken snow where an old oak tree had fallen and let the sky through. The snow, falling thickly now, sifted over her tracks, so that she thought in this light she could not have followed her own back trail. Then she turned in a slow circle, and she silently thanked the trees and the snow.

When she set off again she felt a rising in her, like birdsong when the sun returned and the mornings first became loud again in the spring. It was enough to be alone. All these months, every day since the far-minded man had brought her to this place, they had not left her alone. They had not trusted her alone. Always her mother-in-law’s voice, always her sister-in-law and her children, always a weaving, a bread dough, a something to do. She had liked these tasks well enough at home. If not for themselves, she had liked the talk they brought. 

But these people would teach her few of their words beyond what they needed for a fire or a stew. And she had learned quickly not to speak her own language here. Let her whistle a line of song from home and Lempi would find her the wormiest scouring to do. And then she would tell her son, and he would come to Kyllikki that night. 

Even on the night when the far-minded man had stayed out fishing, and she had waited as the sun went down and he did not come, and she had felt a lightening in her, that she might lie quietly that night with her own thoughts, Ainikki had asked her to the gathering. Kyllikki had wondered at that, afterward. Ainikki coming to her with that awkward catch, adding gesture to a few words to make the invitation plain — had she been moved by any real kindness to the odd outland woman thrust into the family? 

They had gone in the sleigh to another steading, and they had danced. Dancing and music need no language. The steps were close enough to the movements Kyllikki knew, and dancing had always been her language. She felt her body dissolve into the music, and time melted into a standing pool. 

She had danced as she had danced on the night the far-minded man had stolen her bodily and flung her into the rancid furs in his broken sleigh. She had danced her fury at his hands, at his glibness, at this mean, low hut he lived in that he would not repair, and at his mother, who talked endlessly and only to him. She had danced her home, her father calling her his girl of the moon and sending away the men who pressed her, her mother bartering with brisk tenacity, and the firelight infusing the walls in their long hall. 

But Ainikki had told her brother. Why? For spite? Because the outland woman she had hoped to bring as a curiosity, or a butt, had made friends in the dance, in the spontaneous way of movement, when you draw near to another dancer and your body consciously or unconsciously mirrors hers? Kyllikki remembered a fair young woman with flying braids and a taut arm who had swung with her, spinning as they held crossed wrists. They had laughed aloud as the room blurred. She remembered a woman with escaping brown hair and a long, mobile face, older than most, who had turned Kyllikki under her arm, who had taken pleasure in her speed and matched her fancy steps. Kyllikki had shown them dances from home. They had circled about her.

And Ainikki had told the far-minded man. And he had taken out his anger on her family. He had shamed her to them and stolen their horses. And she had stopped trying to be alone.

The air was bitter, and the wind cut through the firs. They grew close-bound, and she loosed showers of snow that swept in the air like smoke. She walked steadily. Just to move with her whole body, too vigorously for thinking, and to be alone with the Riga pine and the silver birches, filled her, and gave the urgency of her flight away from the camp and toward the shore a fierce edge. She could see in her mind the ships beached on the shore and hear the voices around the fire in the low hut. They would drink the far-minded man’s ale as he had drunk theirs.

She meant to circle in a wide ring out from the camp and then to look for their sleigh tracks, to follow them backward. But she felt a stern need to head away, and she feared to find the tracks too soon and be overtaken. When they found she was gone, Lempi would send men after her, she knew. Kyllikki belonged to the far-minded man in Lempi’s eyes, and it would shame them to lose her. Lempi would be angry, and Lempi angry could sing the eagles from the crags. So Kyllikki told herself.

But she walked into the falling snow, and she had no stars to follow. She fought a fear that she would circle too far back and see the light of the camp fires before her again. She checked the line of her footprints back through the trees. She could feel the strain in her hips now. She could dance dusk to dawn, she told herself, even in midwinter, when the sun showed herself for four pale hours and set again. But the wide sliding walk of the snowshoes took her breath, and she could not stop moving for the cold. 

By the time the snow stopped falling, she was shaking as she walked. Her clothing seemed to chafe more than warm, and her muscles cramped. She felt sweat clammy between her shoulders, and fear kicked her that the cold was seeping inside her coat. 

The clouds began to thin before the wind. It buffeted her as she leaned into it. She could see shreds of empty sky in the skimming cloud, but she no longer knew which stars to follow. She began to sing as she walked. In gasping breath a sip above a whisper she sang to the _haldi_ of this place. She called to the familiar spirits of the spruce, the resin pine, the owls who might stir now that the snow had slackened, the hazel grouse and the willow ptarmigan and the caparcaille in their nooks. She sang to them to guide her. Almost she felt the wood itself turn to listen. The silence and the new snow, brighter now in the cloud and starlight, hummed with expectation.

Nothing came. In the distance a great grey owl gave it’s slow solo call. She imitated it, and it called again, a lonely sound far off in the hills. She could feel the expanses of trees between her and that small sound. She tried to set her face toward it. She walked on, calling and listening in the long pauses to hear it again.

The pauses stretched, and the owl’s voice grew fainter. She plunged on as though she could catch it up. Finaly as she stood panting in a dense tangle of branches to free her sleeve and scarf, she called, and called again, and heard nothing at all. Without that one sound, the wood grew dense around her. Branches soughed and groaned in the cold. In this huddle of trees, the darkness thickened.

Stooping and swimming through branches, she broke through into air. A shelf of rock thrust through the snow crust, an island in the trees, and beside it, sheltered maybe from the shoals of firs around it, an immense pine tree grew. Its branches stretched wider than the far-minded man’s mean hut, and it grew straight, head and shoulders over the larches, holding a clear space in the snow. New snow bowed its lowest branches to the ground.

She stopped before it, heaving for breath. Her head felt light, and her legs trembled as though a song had sapped her sinews. A shred of cloud blew away at the pine tree’s peak, and she saw the moon. It was a young moon waxing, not yet half full, and it shone on the soft needles crusted with snow as though the tree had snagged it in the highest branches. 

Kykkilli leaned on a spar of rock. The wind had scoured it free of drifts. Her lungs ached in time with her thighs, and she held herself upright, getting her breath. The cold came with her stillness. Her hands burned in her gloves, and she set down the bowl and cradled them under her arms. 

She thought, _was this why I left? Did I mean to walk until I fell into the snow because it would be better than staying there until he came back? Maybe at the last. But everything I have done all these months has been just a way to keep living, whatever I needed to do to stay alive. I have not thought beyond that. Just the staying alive took all the will I have. Just to face the women with a clear face, to keep them silent. Just to face the man in silence, without crying out, to go on living through the times when he touched me. I used to look into the fire and call in my mind to the haldi of the burning wood to reach out to me, to pull me into the dark behind the flames. I told myself our stories of portals. I told myself they would come. My brothers would come. Or the birds of grief flying low on their fall migrations. I made myself into an old squaw, a sea duck, and told myself this body was not mine, when it was made to do what I could not think of, and I told myself my body was feathers, bird bones and sea-spray, and I cloaked myself in feathers. When I walked out in the mornings sick and sore on the frosted grass, I looked in every milking pail for a hatch to crawl through, and when the sea ducks flew against the gold of the winter horizon, I memorized their shadows and their voices. I gave myself amber eyes and amber feathers on my breast, amber and brown on my wings, a black beak for a mouth, and no water could chill me._

She was shuddering now, the deep shivering of a body desperate to warm itself, and her feet seemed to splinter when she kicked them against the rock, as though her boot tops had cut off the flow of blood to them. If she crawled beneath the lowest tree branches, could the snow shut out the wind and keep her from freezing? She should go on, or Lempi’s men would reach the steading and wait there for her, and her own people would give her up and go. But if she let go this rock she would fall, and in this deep snow, if she lost the surface tension of her snowshoes, she would flounder and sink in thigh-deep. 

She held fast to the rock, and she looked up at the moon, and she sang to it. She sang with stiffening lips, letting go awareness of her body and holding the memory of her mother and her sisters at the dancing in her own hall — and the music of her childhood. 

Young woman-moon, look down and hear me.  
Not so few and not so many  
days ago you first ascended  
opened in the fields of heaven  
looked about your starry heathlands  
where the winter constellations  
ripen like the juniper.

Woman-moon so new awakened  
walking in your starry heathlands  
may you wander wide and freely  
in the joyance of your young blood.  
This is your unbridled season.  
In this turning of the year wheel  
woman-moon, your time grows longer,  
you outshine the son of heaven.

As you walk among the skyherds  
with your supple limbs unfettered,  
gathering glimmers in your basket  
woven of the limber ash wood,  
woman moon, see far below you  
snowshoe hare and teal and eider,  
reindeer, brown bear, fox and petrel,  
harlequin, grey seal and whooper.

Woman-moon who, open-handed,  
spills the glimmer from your basket  
over larch and fir and pinewood,  
even from your stary heathlands  
hear me calling in the pine trees.

Not so few and not so many  
days ago I walked as you do  
in my own homefields long-striding  
with the west wind in my hair  
and my dark hair all unbraided.  
In the sauna it flowed loose-lapped  
young waves on my naked shoulders.  
Manna, Aske, I was waxing  
and like you not yet half full.

Not so few and not so many  
days ago, when you lay sleeping,  
I was bridled, foundered, fettered,  
brought here on a broken sleighbed.  
Aske, Manna, woman-moon,  
send me now a light to see,  
send me now the supple sap-juice  
of your sinew. Stir my cold blood.  
Shield me like the winter hare.

She slid against the rock, and snow showered from the sheer face of it, leaving micah and quartz crystals. They glinted in the moonlight. She dug unsteady fingers into the stone, and the points of light swam before her eyes as she caught herself. They seemed very bright. She wanted to think about that, but her hands hurt where they took her weight. Slowly she steadied herself on her snowshoes. Slowly she pushed herself upright. The rock seemed to shine now like a tin lantern. But the light did not come from within, she thought. It was reflected. She leaned her head against it to look upward. The moon now seemed really caught in the pine tree. A light shone, cool as quartz but too bright to look at directly. 

The snow gleamed, and the ice crystals on the pine needles glinted and flickered like a spray of water on a launching duck’s wing. She stood transfixed. The tree shadows on the snow, and the shifting of deep underwater blue and grey and green in the needles, and the light on the ice crystals caught her under the breastbone. She ached with the beauty of it. She wanted to weep, but the tears would have frozen. She bit down on her scarf, shuddering now with joy as well as with cold.

And there came a soft sound, softer than the owl’s call — a high, clear, crystaline sound that seemed a part of the soft light and the falling shards of ice around her. She jerked in panic. She had never stopped listening for the sounds of people behind her. But she stayed still, outlined against the glowing stone.

And a reindeer, two reindeer appeared against the light. Their antlers and then their soft noses showed around the massive pine tree, impossibly near the impossible light. _It’s too far south,_ she thought, afraid for them more than herself. None of Lempi’s folk harnessed reindeer. 

Kyllikki heard bells. They whirred like the wings of startled grouse. Hoofs touched snow, and she heard the sound she had been stretched for, the schuss of skis. Somehow into a clearing that seemed to make room to hold them came eight reindeer, shining golden-grey in the light, and a sleigh shadowed like the spruce boughs. One of the lead reindeer nuzzled at Kyllikki’s chest. The other rested his chin against her shoulder. She could feel his breath. They smelt of pine and snow and sweet grass.

And the driver had leapt down into the snow and come into the light, and she was a woman. And she wore the gátki. The silver glinted at her collar and on her breast. A woman of Pohjola, a woman of the Saami, and driving reindeer — she was a kinswoman. The light kicked like flung snow in Kyllikki’s eyes and then vanished.

 

She woke in the sleigh bed, wrapped in a fur, and she started in wild panic and struggled in the folds. She had been here before. But the voice above her was a woman’s, and it was not above her, holding her down, but alongside her, holding her up. She gulped air. The voice spoke the language of Pohjola, her own Saami, and she did not hear the words, only that they were different, that she was not there, not then in the night the far-minded man had pinioned her in his sleigh with his indifferent weight and a stiffened blanket over her mouth. She turned to this new voice and clung to it, burrowed into it to force away his voice and the ceaseless sound of the sleigh runners taking her away.

Her face was no longer cold-stiffened. She held cloth, and the cloth held a body, a woman’s body, and the voice was not her mother’s. A hand was pressed to the back of her head, but in gentle emphasis. It moved when she did. She was holding the body against hers so hard that it must have hurt, and her hip jutted against this woman, and her head butted into her breast.

Kykkilli began, with slow care, to loosen her hold, as though she could give back some of the privacy she had invaded if she moved softly enough and restore the space between them as though it had never been lost. The light around her came from the pine tree. It had not gone, she realized. She had. She had collapsed, and the driver had carried her to the sleigh and wrapped her warmly and was now, she felt, atom by atom from her soles upward, lying beside her to warm her here, out of the wind. 

As she moved, the form beside her moved and touched her quietly, and the voice went on without haste, until she was collected into herself and she could make out the words.

“Can you sit?”

The woman helped her, and she could see out over the sleigh. The reindeer grouped around it, warming it with their bodies and looking in at her. She stroked a cheek, a warm neck, each in turn, in thanks.

“We should go,” said the woman beside her. “I saw your light. So will others. When we’re moving you may tell me where we’re going. Will you come?” 

Kyllikki nodded, still stroking reindeer and looking past them at the pine tree.

The woman beside her gestured to the reindeer. The leaders backed first, and the creatures, in pairs, uncoiled from the sleigh and silently spread into a line, the ones in front moving forward into the shadows to make room for those behind. They moved swiftly, without a sound or a hitch in the harness. When they all stood facing forward, the leaders had moved out of sight around the pine tree. The driver sent a quiver down the taut rein.

The sleigh began to move. Kyllikki gripped the fur at her throat and then the side of the sleigh as it tipped. Since she had turned into the light in the pine tree, she had not thought beyond the intimate surge of her thread of song, and the feeling of communion too large to contain, as though her heart and her breath pressed against her skin — and then the fear. 

The sleigh rounded the pine tree, and then she saw — hoofs above her, shadowed against the stars. The sleigh had tipped because the lead reindeer were climbing — not climbing the tree — climbing around it. She thought in pounding heartbeats. The pair in front of them held their heads raised and poised, like musicians counting the beat in a rest, and then in even tempo they stepped firmly onto the air. With a soft release of breath the runners left the snow crust, and the sleigh itself, somehow not dragging them down, let go of the ground. 

She felt no speed. She had ridden a sled, coasting until the gathered rush lifted it clear of the slope and slapped it down. But the reindeer swept in a wide, shallow curve around the tree, spiralling up to clear the canopy, and the sleigh seemed to drift behind them like eider down. 

As they drew level with the tree’s peak, the driver touched a rein, and the banking reindeer paused, treading the air, and she looked at the light. Seen close to, it pulsed, and they had to peer through narrowed eyes. Kyllikki reached out instinctively, as though she could stroke it in thanks as she had the reindeer. She reached into the light. Her gloved hand shaped a smooth curve, and she put out both hands and lifted it. It came away like an egg from a nest, as she had often helped to gather eggs from the sea cliffs in the late spring, when the sun never set and the household went nesting together.

She drew it into the sleigh, and her companion wrapped it carefully in one of the soft furs folded in the sleigh bed, to shield the light. Kylikki held it in her lap. Then the deer lept into a long-striding trot, and they were away, skimming the tops of trees. The soft needles brushed their hooves like sea grass.

Kylikki looked down at her hands and rubbed them together. She wondered whether they could be the same shape after touching such a thing, and she wanted to take off her mittens to see, but the height and the wind were adding to the cold. Her companion drew another fur about them both, a thick, dark pelt. Kylikki could not see her face, only the shadow of her cheek, but her hands were deft and gentle.

“I’m Beiwe,” she said, leaning almost forehead to forehead to speak in a low voice. “Where can we bring you?”

Kylikki opened her mouth to name the far-minded man’s steading — and tasted cold air, and drew a rough breath.

“He will come after me,” she said. 

She found herself telling the story. Her companion had to know, she thought, what danger this kindness might bring on her. In the relief of speaking again in her own language, she talked in a gulping rush, and though she leapt like the deer over parts of it, she felt her companion’s quiet attention drawing her on and filling in, she thought, what she could not say. She spoke briefly of the kidnapping, more of her captivity, and the far-minded man’s viscious return to her family — worse even than his viscousness in returning there and leaving her here in his place.

“I was going back to the shore,” she said, “to find them, to go home. But he will come after me. He has come there once already because of me, and he told me —” her throat blocked the words, and she twisted the find fur in her hands until the guard hairs bristled. Her hands knotted like her breath. Her companion said nothing but sat turned toward her, waiting without pressure. Finally, almost inaudibly, she said, “he told me my brother is dead.”

She remembered the morning her brother was born, when she had first held him, and her mother had told her how to support his head. Her brother, Bigán, the first son, who would have danced with his sword blade around the arrogant interloper who insisted on challenging him. Her brother would have scorned to fight a drunk man. He would have laughed at the rough challenge, at the staggering traveler and his bad language. He would have feinted at the air as though teasing an importunate child.

She felt an arm settle on her shoulders. Looking out at the lythe curve and stretch of a reindeer’s shoulder, watching the skin crease and smooth, she said, “he told me he killed my brother in my father’s hall. And then he ran. That’s why my people came. If I go back to them now, what else will he break?”

“That’s why they came,” her companion repeated, in a low voice, without emphasis.

After a long stretch of sweeping air and the crystaline brush of ice falling from the highest pine needles, Kyllikki spoke again, so softly that only someone leaning down to her, against the sheltered side of the sleigh, could have heard her above the wind.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. They came to avenge him. All these months, and they never came for me.”

The arm about her shoulders moved to circle her, and a hand covered hers. They sat shoulder to shoulder, and the reindeer loped toward the moon as she lifted toward the peak of her arc.

“You can come with me,” Beiwe said, still low and slow and quiet. “Where we live, there are protections. You are welcome there.”

“My family —” she lifted a clenched hand and let it rest again on the swathed bundle on her knees. “If he finds me gone, he will savage them, whether I am with them or not.”

“I think he would go there now in any case,” said the voice against her hooded temple. “They have burned his steading. We can send them warning.”

“Oh, God.” Kyllikki turned to meet the dark eyes. “Oh, God. I’ll come with you, if you will tell me what I can give you.” Her voice sank into her chest and the stars blurred against her eyelids. “I have nowhere else to go.”

 

She lay stunned with exhaustion, but she could not sleep. The wind planed above their heads, above the curved sides of the sleigh. She felt the wood beneath the piled furs, against her shoulders, and she felt warm in the rhythmic rocking as the reindeer cantered. Over the leaders’ shoulders she could see the curve of the tail of the Little Bear glittering. They strode on following the north star, and the wind rasped ceaselessly above her. 

She began to talk, softly at first, a few words and a silence, and then more, and a snow-melting spate. She talked as she had not since she came south, and before that maybe, when the first suitors came, when she was no longer a child clinging to the fence of the reindeer corrals, when she first knew she would have to leave her home. 

“I left mine,” Beiwe said at her shoulder, “rather than marry the many they wanted.”

Kyllikki thought of bonfires and how it was sitting around the flame and talking when the night and the flame hid the faces around you, and the voices out of the shadows felt close against her skin, and into each silence a voice would speak, or sing, and the silences seemed deep and taut with unexpected sayings waiting for a voice. People could say things there they would not say in sunlight.

She had fought the suitors and danced to forget them. Would it have been better to have accepted one of them? Better than exile?

“How long have you been here?” Beiwe asked her, a quiet listening presence at her back. 

Kyllikki heard the absence in the careful words. 

“I miscarried,” she said. “Less than three months. And then he ran, and he has not been back.”

She pulled the fur tight around her to keep from trembling.

 

They talked into a dry-throated quiet, and she lay on her back, watching the stars pass overhead, while Beiwe sat up taut beside her. She did not think she slept, but without sun and shadow she had no sense of time. The sound that roused her to full blood-pounding was a soft crunch and sigh.

And then she knew the sleigh runners had touched down, and the reindeer had taken the weight in a delicately spread and balanced line, and they were gliding on the snow.

She sat up and then knelt forward to see over the high, cured side.

Around her, mounded shapes of snow mingled like an archipelago of small hills. The highest seemed no more than ten times the height of a man. They crowded near each other, connected by lower snow tunnels. She saw smoke against the stars, blowing it had over the roofs at home, and among the domes, glimmers of light at the low mouths of the entrance tunnels. Moving lights must, she thought, be lanterns carried by figures too far off and too muffled to see clearly. 

But lights were coming nearer, and they rounded a curve of mounds into a long flat, trampled space, and here came another sleigh driting down to touch the snow in front of them, and a third before it streaking toward a shadow that became a long mound with a rounded top, shaped to shed the snow, and gleaming along the roof with vents, each curved like the blowhole on a whale’s back. 

People were waiting as they came closer to unhitch the reindeer, to lead them into the long house, to light each other across the snow. They called greetings and messages, and she was in the middle of a homecoming, like the evening after a hunting party at home, when those in the kitchen met those returning, to take in the game and bring out the ale and hear the day’s stories.

“We saw the Khajuraho,” a woman called as she vaulted out of the sleigh in front of them. She greeted a figure holding a reindeer’s head with a one-armed hug that set his lantern swinging. “You have to come next time and see the temples. The stone looks like waterfalls in the moonlight. I’m going to name this sleigh Vakaha. It means ‘one who carries.’”

They had gone in, the reindeer untacked and led away to be rubbed down and fed with hot mash, the sleigh moved aside under cover to be oiled and dusted, and people and lights moved around Kyllikki’s sleigh, giving suggestions, holding the lanterns high and geting into and out of each other’s way. This did not seem to be a place where people gave orders, not even as her mother had bidden the household. This seemed to be a place where people saw a job to do and did it. But they must have known to watch for people coming home. Here came another sleigh behind them, this one carrying four people all singing _Noche de paz, noche d’amor._ They held long tapers, and as they waited their turn they lit them, and they held up the lights fizzing like golden petals. As she climbed out of the sleigh, she saw the party behind her hand their tapers to more of their kinsmen who came up to take the reins and add to the singing.

Hands reached up as she swung herself over the edge. Beiwe called down from behind her, “Where is Cuovgat? Is Nikolaos back? Bless you Hanná, we need to find them.”

Hands helped her down, and she went to the reindeer before they could be led away, to stroke them, to lean against their backs.

Behind her, a man’s voice said her name.

She jerked, startling the young buck reindeer she stood against and the slight figure, too hooded and wrapped to see, who had just told Kykilli the reindeer’s name. She wanted to be able to find all the team again.

The figure who had called her beckoned her to follow. He held a lantern in one hand and something wrapped in hide against his chest, as she still held her moon stone in her arms. Beiwe turned from a group talking together, and the three of them went together through a tunnel in the longhouse wall, where the light kicked up gleams on the walls and roof. The firefly glimmering went on before them, and Kyllikki saw more lights set into carved niches in the walls, though she could not see what fueled them, and the snow above them held no marks from smoke. Tunnels forked and divided and rayed out from galleries, and she surrendured herself to not counting.

They came into a wider chamber with thick woven hangings across the openings at each end. She saw wooden benches along the walls and knobbled icicles rimming the wall at eye height. Beiwe crossed to open the hanging in the far wall, and beyond it the passage ended in a low, round chamber with lights ringing the walls, and benches set against them, and in the center, the ring of stones. They had brought her to the sauna.

“We are bringing fire,” Beiwe said, “if you want it. There is a dinner set out for the homecomers, and you may sleep where you like. There are long rooms for those who have no families, or rooms where you can sleep alone. We are bringing towels here. Many of us may want a bath later.”

She ran a hand into her own dark hair, which was braided at each side and gathered behind to fall loose down her back. She had taken off her hat as they walked in the warmer snow-insulated air. In the light, her eyes were amber-dark, her hair sleek and thick and fine, and her face lean, high-cheekboned. She gave Kyllikki a wry, rueful look, half a smile, and she was not a listener in the night but a tired and self-collected woman with worn boots and caloused hands, who thought that heat would feel good on her chapped skin. Kyllikki felt the tears on her cheeks and chin, and Beiwe touched her shoulder, more tentative in the lamplight, a woman Kyllikki’s height, with wrinkles rayed at her eyelids and a silver thread in her hair, who glowed golden in the lamplight.

Kyllikki took her hands.

“Thank you,” she said. And she swallowed. I can’t bring pain on her. “If he comes —” 

“We will tell you,” Beiwe said.

More lights came, and people hung towels from the ice knobs in the ante room. While they lit the fire, the man called Hanná set down what he carried on a bench beside the towels. It was the wooden bowl she had brought with her.

“Will you leave it with me?” Beiwe asked her, and a note of strain came into her voice. “And the moonstone too, while you bathe? I think some of our people can tell us more about them.”

So she let them go, and the people went, leaving all the lights but one around the benches in the anteroom. When they had gone, she undressed. They had laid hides across the floor to the far door, and she went in. She left the lights outside. In the round room, the heat had swelled to push against the walls. She felt along the bench, around the wall, until the curve hid even the light from the door. Her hand brushed a soft, damp clump, and she lifted a birch slapper carefully off the bench. And then she sat, and just sat, curled around the leaves in her hand that stuck against her belly, while the heat built and pulsed. 

How long since she had last been naked? She had washed in hasty sponging in the south, not daring to share the bath house there, where anyone might walk in. How long since she had touched her own naked skin? The sweat pricked along her shoulders and between her thighs. How long since she had felt the deep heat in her muscles and the sweat that ran down her forehead like tears? The tears had fallen silently all this time. How long since she had wept? It was too cold, and in the south she could not weep. She leaned her head on her knee and the tears came now, for the girl who had danced freely in her father’s hall, for Bigán, her brother, with his upstanding shock of hair, the jut of his chin, the firm sinew and surety in him, for the days when he had come to her as a child at night, with a child’s frustrations about the other children, and the days when he had come to her as a young man testing the shape of intangible things, and for his pride in her when she had danced in their hall. She wept for him. She wept for her own fear. The sweat ran on her arms and legs and back. She clenched and shook, and the leaves slid over her wet knees. Slowly she drew them up. She did not slap, as she once would have to set her blood tingling, but she traced her knees, her legs, her hips, her ribs with the softened branch tips. The steam-thick air smelled sweet and sharp with birch resin. She wept for her body and for the unborn baby and for all that did not have to happen. She traced her breast bone, her collar bone, her throat. The leaves touched her mouth and her eyes. She sat up to draw the branch down her back. The leaves marked her calves, the sole of one foot, and then the other. 

She stood, shuddering and feeling the heat in her core muscles, in her organs, shuddering at the touch of the leaves, and she began to move, as though she could get away from the soft, insistent touch. The sharp smell of her own sweat mixed with the sweet astringent birch, and she moved in the shuffling step of an old house dance, in the fast skippping footwork she had always known. Around the room, around again, she went until she was breathing hard and the heat lapped her round, and she felt her arms stretch and her toes arch, and she spun until the dark room turned around her. Her aching body stretched. and she thought, _this is my body. This body, with all it can do. This body is mine, and I will have to feel it, and think with it, and make it mine, because I need it. Because I will need it to keep him away from here, and from them, and from everyone and everything I love._

She felt limp. She felt as though all the vital water had drained out of her, leaving the salt to tighten her skin. She felt through the hanging into the outer room, and there on the bench sat a jug of water and a clay cup. It dripped chill down her as she tried to pour and gulp her first cup. She took a towel and rubbed her body, each leg, each arm, each rib. And then she turned to dress.

Beside the jug, where she had folded and hung her clothes, she found Beiwe’s gátki. The dark green tunic with the lighter green of new-growth pine needles at the front and around the neck and at the cuffs, and the dark green skirt full enough to dance in, and the dark green leg wraps and boots, and the boots themselves, and the four-piece fur-lined hat, sat neatly, and Kyllikki’s clothes had gone. But they had not been her clothes. They had been southern clothing she had worn of necessity. These here were the clothing she knew, from high days at home. The silver and pewter disks at the throat clinked faintly when she lifted the shirt, like ice or bells.

 

She found Beiwe in a domed room larger than the reindeer shed. When she had dressed and folded her towel and come out into the passage, she had found a quiet figure sitting under the nearest light, and he had led her to the homecoming feast.

They came out of a tunned that had grown steadily wider and higher as more tunnels joined it — and into a round room with a ceiling hung with lanterns. Between and behind them she could just see the shell-like curves of vent holes in the roof, and in the center of the floor a bonfire was burning in a ring. Around it, tables lined the round walls, and people lined the tables. Lights were set into the walls, some as low as the table top and some many times higher than the height of a man, and here, for the first time, she could see these people clearly. They were slight, deft, and bright in their holiday tunics. Her guide smiled over his shoulder at her with hair as white as a polar bear’s and a proud nose. He seemed to move like a polar bear too, she though, somehow shamblng and liquid at the same time.

Beiwe came to them. She wore the kind of fur and leggings she might have used to shovel out the reindeer pens, but she moved quickly, and with an urgency that stilled protests. 

“We have a little time,” she said. “He is coming. One man on skis over the tundra is easy to see, and he does not know he is watched. Nikolaos and I will know when he is close. We’ll have time to do what we can.”

A man taller than most in the room came up beside her to put his own dark red coat over her shoulders. He had red hair and a red beard, trimmed short, and he wore a dark red gátki with cream and gold at the breast and workman’s boots. And the the easy way he traded space with Beiwe told Kyllikki they belonged to each other.

He smiled at Kyllikki, and she felt in him a willed calm, like a man gentling a frightened animal and thinking only of each movement he makes, one at a time.

Then Hanná stood by them, a dark, muscled man now that he wore no coat. He was no taller than Kyllikki, with ruffled dark hair and brown eyes, and a look in them as steady as tidewater. She tought again of the sea ducks that her people called birds of sorrow, and she thought _maybe they are birds of sorrow because they have the strength to listen to it when it comes._

“We are the haldi,” he said. “We gather at mid-winter to face the coming year. We are all here together, and we will help you.”

He held out to her the wooden bowl she had carried into the woods. The outside seemed smoothed and furrowed with the grain of the wood, and the inside, when he held it to the light, glowed like living tissue, like the inside of an eyelid. 

“Cuovgat has seen to it,” Hanná said. "He is our keeper of the lights. And here is this too.”

He handed her the moonstone, wrapped now in a soft woolen cloth. She carefully loosened the wrapping to peer in, and when it did not blind her she held it loose in her hand. It was a smooth quartz now, swirled like honey, as large as a duck egg.

The lights in the hall dimmed from full sun to candle flame. Hanná turned over her bowl to hold the smoothed surface upright, and he began to stroke and then to sound on it a steady beat like a heart beat. Voices joined him. A deep voice she thought must be Nikolaos sang a quiet thrumming bass line. And then Beiwe sang, and her voice was low, alto, drawing out, insistent as a diving whale.

They did not sing in words. They sang, and Kyllikki felt the song in her blood, in her massaged muscles, in the bones of ehr skull. They sang her _joik_ — they sang her — a music that had no words because it sang being, a music sung for babies at birth, a music that sang her life from her first steps to her first terror, from her father swinging her in the air and her mother teaching her the names of the gods as they chopped vegetables to her nights with the village women, and through her days in the south, and through this long night. 

She stood before them, while the bonfire crackled under the music that seemed to guide her breathing, and she felt a sharp elation, a child’s brimming excitement at unexpected guests, an unshakeable certainty that here, in this time, in this place, she had thrown open all doors. She shook back her hair. It lay loose after her bath, unbound on her shoulders. How long since she had felt the touch of it there?

And a falcon screamed. 

How — somehow — a white and brown and golden shape dove plummeting from the roof, feet outstretched. But it did not stoop. The music went on, around it, under it, and the falcon hovered and looked at her out of her brother’s eyes.

“He is coming,” said the bass voice, almost in the tempo of the song.

The lights returned on a deep, welling note, and someone threw wood on the fire. As it roared up, Kyllikki heard even above it the soft, insidious sound of skis. A man was coming down the wide passage, clear in the hallway lights. Tall, bright-eyed, dishevelled, in his good clothing torn and awry, he came crashing toward her as he had that first night in her father’s hall, when she had called him a good-for-nothing, a wasteful bully. And that had been the goad from the beginning. She knew what he was. No matter how many other girls he fooled and broke, she knew, and the knowing would not change.

He slid and strode into the doorway, clamoring for her. He was raging. In this mood he must have struck down her brother without knowing or caring, like a child in a tantrum flailing in a frenzy until he banged something hard enough to hurt. 

She took the wooden bowl from Hanná, turned it upright, and set the moonstone in it. The light blazed out again, as it had in the pine tree.

“Blood of your kinsman, Ahti,” she called to him, and her voice seemed to grow like the light. “I have you bound, Ahti. I know your name, Ahti. Go back, or I will sing my brother’s voice into your ears every day of your life.”

 

She could not see him clearly for the blinding light, but she knew he stood in the doorway.

“Go back,” she said. “You think you are a fine singer, Ahti, because you have begged your way out of trouble, even when your mother had to dredge you herself from the river of the dead. I know your name, Ahti. I know how you were made. And I will not sing it, here in this place. I know how better things are made. 

On a clifftop by the ocean  
where the west wind blows the salt spray,  
where the east wind drives tide waters  
there the sea squaw weaves her nest.  
There she feels within her sea-cave  
the first movement of the membrane,  
liquid wellspring coalescing  
into Aske’s shape and shadow.  
There where Manna draws tidewater,  
there she makes her living moonstones,  
lays her eggs into the sweetgrass  
and she feels their pulses quicken  
as she warms them, feels them harden,  
liquid turned to bone and sinew.  
No bright steel or reaching finger,  
hunter or prospecting child  
though they find her sea-crag shelter,  
though they break her shells to fragments  
can engender light as she does.  
None of those who plunder nests  
know the swelling, cracking open  
as the first egg moves beneath her  
and the beak wins through the egg shell  
her heart moves with floundering wingbeats,  
drying down and new-tried voices.  
No one who would harm a nestling  
knows the light on ocean water  
floating at the harbor mouth  
where the ducklings on the wavetops  
wash across the rocks and surface  
in the race of spreading foam  
and the heart-glad sunlit glitter  
safely riding winter waves.

Her voice and the light shining like the sun on the sea filled the room with her own childhood, with the motion of a boat drifting and the oars lifted out of the water. She had floated there for as long as her arms would hold her steady in the water, counteracting the current, to watch the young ducks swimming. It was a moment out of time, a time without arrogance, and the sea vaster than any human scale, and she had felt simply there, vividly aware of the movement of water and the smell of salt and the light on the ducklings’ backs.

The light spread around the hall, glinting on plates and spoons and brooches like a breaking wave. And she could see him still standing in the doorway. But the brashness, the vibrating momentum had gone out of him. She had sung it out of him.

The light receded until she could see his face. With the rage driven out it hung slack, still defiant but uncertain. He no longer looked devil-may-care in his battered clothes and unshaven chin. He looked ashen and purposeless.

She lifted the bowl before her, and as the light surrounded her she walked towrd him across the hall. She came within reach, with the light between them. 

“Go home, Ahti,” she said. “You have a mother. There’s one woman left who loves you. Keep her alive.”

He stumbled back away from her. She waited only until she knew he had turned, and then she turned away from him, into the fire-lit hall. 

Beiwe and Nikolaos and Hanná had come with her. They stood near her, and others had crowded forward along the table. She held a stone in a wooden bowl, and the light came from the fire. She touched the stone. It felt blood warm.

“Where does it come from, when it comes?” she said, and she wondered why she had sung that one memory of sea ducks befoe they became sadness. 

“You,” Hanná said, his voice low and his eyes on her, as along the table voices began to sing, _Noche de paz, noche d’amor._ Silent night.

**Author's Note:**

> In the Saami language, Bigán means hawk, and Hanná means long-tailed duck, the sea squaw, the bird of sorrow, according to the research I've had time for, which is much less than I want to do — this world is an amazing place! 
> 
> And Cuovgat means light. 
> 
> When I chose this fandom, I was thinking of the legends of the Saami, and the world of the Kalevala is new to me but I learned with delight that Kyllikki herself is of the Saami people. So I have tried to bring in both worlds... and a third you may recognize. Thank you - discovering these stories is a gift!


End file.
